Crash
by Lucillia
Summary: The story of an Immortal pilot who is determined to soar despite the number of times he had been rather violently brought back down to the ground.
1. Murdoch

Harailt Murdoch had always loved high places, and had dreamed of soaring like the birds in the sky for as long as he could remember. He had in fact died of his love of high places and desire to soar like the birds the first time he had done so. Had IQ tests existed back then, one would have found that Harailt Murdoch was on that step beyond mere genius where the line between genius and madness became blurred and intermixt. After all, it would take either an idiot or a certain kind of genius to climb fifty feet up a tree in order to get a look at a nest full of fledglings that was located on a particularly unsturdy branch in order to examine their developing wing structure with the intent of figuring out exactly how they flew.

It had been on the day that he had first seen his first hot-air balloon during that exhibition in New York during the opening days of the Nineteenth Century however, that his destiny had been set. For the next hundred years, he was Harailt Murdoch Balloon Pilot. Then came Kittyhawk...

After Kittyhawk, everything and nothing changed for Murdoch. He was still a pilot, but now, rather than being held at the whims of the wind, he could soar anywhere he chose. As he wasn't the lucky sort who had been born with a silver spoon, or the patient sort who could leave money sitting in a bank for ages, he couldn't afford a plane or even parts for one on his own. After a few years of trying to figure out how to get his hands on his own airplane, he found a solution to his problem when the United States Army acquired several newfangled contraptions.

He enlisted. Then, he re-enlisted, and re-enlisted, and re-enlisted...Always with the same initials, and always with a variant of his family name, Murdoch, Murdoc, Murdock...

In Korea, he was introduced to a relatively new flying contraption that he used primarily to lift the wounded off of the battlefield and carry them to surgery. By the time Vietnam rolled around, flying in one of them or one of its more advanced descendants became old hat, and he could do tricks that people were willing to swear were impossible in it.

It had also been in Vietnam that Murdock had made a bunch of friends. Friends who let him fly anything and everything he could get his hands on, and didn't get too pissed when he crashed like he often did...


	2. His First Crash

Harailt Murdoch was very lucky that he hadn't become an Immortal as a boy. Throughout his childhood in the mid-fifteenth century, he had always been climbing on something, rocks, trees, the roof, you name it. He'd fallen any number of times as well, with the worst fall having been the day he had broken his leg.

Fortunately, the bone-setter that lived in the village was competent, and he hadn't been left with a limp.

Sometimes, as he went to sleep, his mother would tell him the story of the day the hawk had brought him to her.

Had he been born in another century, his parents probably would have taken him to doctor after doctor to figure out what was up with him, and the results of an IQ test would have caused him to be placed in any number of programs for gifted children as he was rushed through the grades until he ended up in college at a ridiculously young age. Had he been born in another century, he would have learned to read and write as a small child rather than when he was nearly a hundred years old. After all, back in those days, there was really no reason to teach a farmer's son who wasn't going to be entering the clergy to read and write.

Perhaps, it had been his earlier luck that had caused him to even consider climbing a certain tree when he was in his early thirties.

It could be said that Harailt's life really began the day a tree branch snapped while he was crawling along it in order to get a peek into a nest.

Harailt had hit several branches on the way down, breaking bones each time he did, before he finally hit the ground head-first. When Harailt woke up, it was to find that he was completely uninjured, rather than dying of mortal wounds. As he lay under the tree, he wondered whether or not he had dreamed the fall, and whether or not he was actually alive.

Deciding to shelve the problem for later, he made his way home where his wife started screaming at him for wandering off and being gone all day and night, rather than tending to the farm like he should have been. This of course was nothing new, as he had always been easily distracted, and as a result, his chores tended to fall by the wayside.

A year later, as he was tending to his crops, a stranger who had been wandering by had stopped at his farm and informed him that he was Immortal.

Knowing that it wouldn't kill him, he went out to the tree where a new nest had been built in another one of the branches, and climbed...


	3. The Day of the Kite

If you've ever heard of the old Chinese story about the man and his kite, you would get a basic idea as to how Harailt, who had picked up a reputation for harmless madness in the town he had wandered to and settled down in during the latter half of the Sixteenth century, had crashed a second time.

Murdoch had been over a century old by that point, and had taken to wandering the world like many young Immortals did, settling down for a year here, five years there, a decade over there, and so forth. During his travels, he had picked up a student who was nearly as brilliant as he was. A student who was primarily interested in poetry unfortunately. Fortunately, the boy had been the son of a carpenter, and they had come to an arrangement where he traded reading lessons for the young man who had only just reached his twentieth year after attaining Immortality two years earlier for lessons in carpentry.

He had learned how to sew from his mother after he had broken his leg, during the long two months when he couldn't work in the field like his brothers and sisters because he couldn't walk very far, and had been determined to be of use somehow.

He hadn't been shot down by the archers of a forward thinking emperor who could see that the next application of the kite would be a military one, but he had crashed nonetheless, having been brought down by a lack of wind to keep him aloft.

The thing that he remembered most about that day when he had turned his giant kite into the wind, the kite he'd made when a gale that had nearly blown him into the air as he tried to hold onto the ends of his cloak had given him an idea, had been that for a brief while, before the wind died down, he had flew. For a few all too brief minutes, he had soared.

Like Icarus who had gone too close to the sun however, he had also plummeted back down to earth.

He had naturally died on impact, and promptly been buried at the crossroads by a town that had been convinced he was a witch when he blew by overhead crying out in equal parts fear and elation. Fortunately, his student had been kind enough to dig him up before they ran out of town just ahead of the mob who had banded together to hunt the young man down.

As Murdoch ran, trailing behind his unhappy student who had come to love the town they had lived in for the past year, he vowed that one day he would take to the skies again.


	4. The Balloon

Not counting the number of times that he fell out of trees. and off cliffs and bridges and other high places because he couldn't stop climbing in an attempt to regain that feeling he'd felt when he had soared, Harailt's next crash had taken place in the early Nineteenth Century. It wasn't as if Harailt had been deliberately and repeatedly committing suicide in the centuries between that day he'd soared on the back of a kite in the Sixteenth and the day he had seen that balloon flying over New York in the Nineteenth, but knowing that he wouldn't permanently die had taken away a great deal of his fear of falling which had made him take risks no sane person would have. Risks such as leaping from one unsteady tree branch to another like an over-sized squirrel, or standing too close to the edge of a cliff when he was being battered about by hurricane force winds.

He had immigrated to the Colonies back in the 1750s, and had settled in New York after the end of the Revolutionary War. The war, like the war that had come later was rather divisive, and had caused conflict amongst families. His family had been no exception in that regard. The son he had adopted when he had married the boy's widowed mother had decided to run off and join the British Army while he did his best to defend his homestead which eventually became the site of a minor battle. His wife had died in childbirth during the war, but he had forgiven her because going so many years without children would be hard on a woman, especially back then when people thought there was something seriously wrong with them when they had none. With nothing to tie him to the farm, as his adopted son had moved to England when the British Army had pulled out, he had decided it was time to move again. He'd stayed too long anyways, and people were starting to give him the sort of looks that meant trouble.

It had been in New York that Harailt had first seen the balloon, and decided he wanted one. As he had a bit of extra money at the time thanks to the fact that one of his more insane investments had paid off, he had been able to buy the parts necessary to construct one. After a couple months of hard work, he had a prototype that was ready for a test flight.

His first time out, everything went fine until he got a little low on fuel. Alright, he ran out of fuel before he was ready to land.

As they say, what goes up must come down. Harailt came down and the basket of his balloon got caught in a tree.

He then spent the entire night in the tree trying to figure out how to get his balloon out of and off of the tree without damaging it too badly.

His second flight of course went much more smoothly.


	5. Meeting Macleod

It's been said that Duncan Macleod had met just about everybody who was anybody in the immortal world over his lifespan. Being the more approachable of the two Macleod cousins, it is somewhat understandable, and quite possible that this was true. The manner in which Harailt Murdoch and Duncan Macleod had met had been unorthodox to say the least.

In 1861, Murdoch had lucked out by being in the right place at the right time, and had been hired by Thomas Lowe. The work he'd gotten upon being hired had been interesting to say the least, and had been right up his alley.

It had been in the summer of 1862 while Murdoch had been doing a bit of topographical survey work for the Union Army Balloon Corps when he had met Macleod who had been making his way North with a group of slaves he had freed. The tether that had been holding his balloon within reach of his ground crew had snapped somewhere near the bottom, and he decided to cut it loose the rest of the way before it got tangled in a tree and got him into even more trouble he was in.

As he wasn't wearing a uniform, his side might not recognize him and arrest him as a spy, which wouldn't be fun. The other side could also arrest him as a spy for pretty much the same reason. Not fun either.

As he was busy cutting the tether loose, he fell out of the basket when the half-severed tether caught on something below, and abruptly halted the balloon's forward progress. Had he been in a safer position, such as not half hanging out of the balloon while being seated on the edge of the basket, it wouldn't have happened.

As it was, it was quite fortunate for all involved that the person Murdoch had landed on had been immortal, considering the fact that the both of them had been killed on impact.


	6. First Flight

Harailt Murdoch whooped with joy as the small aeroplane lifted off from the ground. This was his first solo flight in such a craft, and it reminded him of the day with the kite more than anything. As he soared in a way that couldn't be done in a balloon or a dirigible, the world below with its rumors of war brewing in Europe, a war that could reach his former homeland which still held a place in his heart, fell away. There was nothing but him and the sky.

He played with the controls of the small craft, trying to see exactly what it could do. There was no fear of death to hold him back the way it would an ordinary man, and because there was no fear to hold him back, he took even greater and greater risks. Risks that just about everyone else would have thought too insane to even consider.

As he was getting his plane to shoot straight up into the air at top speed, the engine stalled and died on him. Despite his best efforts to get his plane restarted, he ended up ploughing into the ground. Fortunately, he managed to escape with nothing more than a broken leg that had to be re-broken and re-set later. To keep up appearances, he had been forced to wear a cast for two months, despite the fact that it itched, and completely threw off his balance.

Fortunately, he wasn't challenged during that time.

As he waited to return to active duty, he feared that he would be thrown out because he'd crashed the plane which the military had only a few of, but his fears had turned out to be unfounded. He had only narrowly been allowed to stay because his flying had impressed his superiors who had never seen flying quite like his. He had done things in that plane that had never been done before. Admittedly though, flight in heavier than air aircraft was only a few years old in those days.

When he finally got back after he had "recovered", every other pilot had wanted to buy him drinks, and all of the mechanics who maintained the military's new aeroplanes wanted to murder him.


	7. A New Name

Harailt Murdoch scowled as he made his way back to the airfield, hoping that his plane which was limping along would make it rather than crash in a field somewhere where the Germans could get their hands on it and use the parts to fix their own planes. Grumbling over the fact that if he'd volunteered sooner rather than waited for America to join the war, he wouldn't be flying a piece of junk, he continued to do anything and everything he could from the cockpit to stay in the air.

The problem was, his plane wasn't just a piece of junk, it was a shot up piece of junk that was leaking fuel amongst other problems that needed immediate attention. With every passing second, it got lower and lower in the air, and with each passing second, crashing became more and more likely. The fact that he'd shot down three planes that day didn't comfort him, especially since if he crashed in the wrong place, the Germans would just use his plane to put more of their men back in the air.

Finally after what seemed like forever, he spotted the landing field, and not a moment too soon. The instant he stopped struggling to keep it in the air, the plane plummeted from the sky. Once again, he walked away from a crash with only minor injuries, a fractured arm this time. By the time that help arrived, he was sitting several yards away from the flaming wreckage laughing his ass off.

"You're howling mad, you know that?" one of the medics who had raced to his aid said.

His only response had been to look at him for a moment before going back to laughing. The man shook his head and started laughing himself.

"You know, after the war's over, if you're ever down in Texas, I might have a job for you." the man said several minutes later when he finally caught his breath.


	8. Temporarily Grounded

Much to Murdoch's chagrin, after the Great War ended, he had been demobbed with the rest of the returning troops, and when he had tried to re-enlist with any part of the military that had planes, he found no openings for him, thanks to the fact that he'd earned a reputation for crashing planes.

He'd have to wait a while, and enlist as someone else after people had been given a bit of time to forget. In the meantime, he would have to find something else to do. Remembering the job offer he'd received from the medic from Texas, he headed down to see if it was still open. The job at the ranch was still there waiting for him when he arrived, and he took it since he didn't have anything else lined up for him at the moment.

Over the years he worked on the McAlister ranch, returning twice after going overseas to fight, Alexander and his family became good friends of his, and even helped him out a bit later when paperwork started getting tricky, and he began to need to do more than move across the city or a hundred miles away or something to change his identity. In fact, when it came around time for him to serve in Vietnam, his old friend had done him a favor and posed as his grandfather. It was one of the last things the old man who had once been a young medic had done for him.

For twenty long years after he was first hired by Alexander who had started working as a country doctor after going to medical school after the war, Murdoch, who was called Howling Mad by his boss, stood gazing up into the sky, wondering when he would be back up there again. Then, there were rumblings in Europe as Germany conquered Poland.

This time, rather than waiting around, he volunteered right off the bat and flew with the RAF.


	9. Another War

Murdoch crashed three times during the second World War, and died twice. He'd freaked out a couple of people who had worked with him prior to one or the other of his deaths, but they eventually calmed down and bought his "set of Identical Triplets" story which he'd sold by acting a bit different after each time he died so people would believe he wasn't the same person.

Had computerized records existed back then, he would never have gotten away with the charade.

The fact that he hated war created an interesting dichotomy. He hated war, but he loved to fly, and about the only time he got to fly these days was during times of war. The wars tainted the purity of the joy he got while flying, but he couldn't keep away from them because he couldn't stop flying. Not flying was like not breathing to him, it hurt.

The type of mission he hated the most during the war was bombing runs. Aerial dogfights he didn't mind too much. With those, it was either him or you, and you did everything you could to make it not be you, and it was okay because they did everything they could to make it not be them. Bombing runs however...During bombing runs, there was no real him or you. There was a chance that you would be shot down, but there was also the fact that civilians who had little to do with the war would be killed by the bombs that had been dropped by you and the men you flew with.

You had to do terrible things to win a war, and that was why Harailt Murdoch didn't like war.


	10. Inauspicious Meetings

The first time Harailt Murdoch had met Hannibal, the man hadn't yet earned that moniker and had only been a young and injured officer in Korea, which was nothing special to him at that point. He had ferried thousands like him by then, and he didn't see anything special or life changing about the young man who was likely not to survive the war if he kept pulling stunts like the one that had gotten him injured that day.

About the only thing about that day that had been memorable to him was that the chopper he had been using to ferry the young man to the 8063rd had gotten hit by enemy fire and crashed, further injuring the patient who had rather luckily survived until help arrived, and later pulled through to the point that he was sent back into battle.

The second time Murdoch had met Hannibal, he'd been going by the name H.M. Murdock, and had re-earned the old nickname that his former boss had given him back during the First World War. This meeting was almost as inauspicious as their previous one.

The first thing Hannibal said to him in Vietnam when he caught sight of him at the controls was "Hey, you're the jackass who crashed the chopper back in Korea!"

He'd tried to pretend that he didn't know what the man was talking about, but it didn't work with the man who had apparently not forgotten his face in the years since their first meeting in Korea which he'd almost entirely forgotten about.

"Try not to crash the chopper this time okay." the young man who was now a middle-aged Lieutenant Colonel said as he got himself settled in the back and they took off.

Ten seconds later, the chopper was hit by enemy fire, and he crashed it. Fortunately, the only thing that was seriously injured this time was his pride.


	11. The Team

Over the course of the Vietnam war, Harailt made three friends that he would willingly stick by for all eternity if he could.

He'd met Face when the young man had tried to scam something from him, which he'd ended up giving to the kid because he'd found his antics amusing, and he'd met B.A. on a mission where he'd again crashed the chopper, and he and Hannibal's unit had been captured and held in a prison camp. It had been because of this that B.A. had become scared of flying, because so far, every time he'd flown, something bad had happened to him.

It had actually been what had happened after the war that had cemented their relationship. There had been that mission from hell, and one crash too many, and he'd done what he'd done once or twice before when things became too much, and retreated from the world a bit. Rather than abandon him to his fate, his friends, his unit, had stood by him, and drew him back out of his shell until he was once more the somewhat hyper and rather eccentric man he had been most of his life.

In the years that followed, the men in his unit had proven themselves to be men of good character time and time again as they willingly took on jobs to help the weak and oppressed, and often did so for little to no pay even though they could ill afford to.

Every night, before he went to sleep, he silently prayed that he wouldn't be torn from his friends, as many had been done before. His friends were good men, so hopefully they wouldn't incur the wrath of the Lord.


	12. The Team Eternal

"You're twisted man." Frankie said as he sat down next to Murdock to wait for the firing squad to be done with their grim task. "If I didn't know what you were, I wouldn't have gone through with this."

Murdock kept a silent vigil while he waited, and flinched when he heard the shots ring out despite...

A couple hours later, Stockwell opened the first of three body bags.

"Dead." he said after a thorough examination.

He moved to the next.

"Dead." he growled.

He moved to the next.

"Dead." he snarled.

How the hell did this happen? He'd personally made sure that Frankie delivered the goods and switched the ammunition for blanks. The A-Team was supposed to be alive, and supposed to be his!

"Take these to the morgue!" he snapped at his assistant.

Hannibal gasped as he awoke. He could have sworn he was dead, and that might actually be the case considering how cold and dark it was wherever he was. He tried to sit up only to whack his head on cold metal.

Where was he? It felt like he was in a freezer.

As he lay there and wondered what was going on as the air in the enclosed space he was in ran out, he heard pounding and yelling coming from nearby, and it sounded like Face and B.A.. Apparently, they were in the same situation as he was in. Just as the air in the cold place he was in ran out, a door opened, and he found himself sliding out of the small space he'd been trapped in on a tray. When he had adjusted to the light that had nearly blinded him when he was slid from the drawer, it was to find Murdock peering down at him.

"Sorry about that Colonel, and you're really not going to like what's coming next, but I need to keep you on ice for a couple of years until Stockwell's convinced you're really dead." Murdock said as he raised a knife.

There was pain, and everything went dark. When he came to, it was to find himself lying in a box after having had a long nightmare of being stuck in unending darkness as the air ran out over and over again.

"Welcome back to the land of the living Colonel." Murdock said when he looked over at him and noticed he was conscious while he was prying the lid off of what looked like a rather badly dented casket. "Stockwell's dead and gone, and nobody's going to be looking for us since you've been dead and buried for twenty years."

"Perfect." Hannibal said as he reached over for the cigar and the lighter that had rather thoughtfully been left at the end of his casket, and lit the cigar. "I love it when a plan comes together."


	13. An Ending, and a New Beginning

The long retired Colonel Decker sighed as he scrawled his name on yet another copy of his book, without even bothering to look up at the person who had asked him to sign it. He was tired, and he was far too old to be roving around shilling books. With the resurgence in popularity of things from the eighties, everyone wanted to hear about the A-Team, especially since certain recently declassified documents that had indicated that they had been innocent all along had come to light.

Several made for t.v. movies about the team, and a film about their unfair trial which had been rigged by some government spook who had gotten ousted at the end of the Cold War that had tried to use the situation to blackmail the team which was supposed to have made one of their miraculous escapes rather than dying onto his payroll had all been made in the last few years. Someone had dragged him onto the bandwagon, and he'd ended up writing a book about the two years he had spent chasing the A-Team. He was signing copies of that book right now.

"Can you make this one out to "My good buddy Hannibal"?" the next customer in line asked as he shoved a copy of his book under his nose.

Something about that voice and those black leather gloves was familiar...

He looked up.

Colonel Smith, who hadn't aged a day in the twenty years since his funeral, was standing in front of him chomping on an unlit cigar. Standing behind Smith was Peck who, aside from the outfit, looked exactly as he had the day he had been buried. Behind Peck was Baracus who was similarly unchanged. Grinning and waving at him from behind Baracus was Murdock who was one of those lucky bastards who still looked like they were in their thirties when they were actually in their sixties. In fact, it looked as if Murdock hadn't aged a day since the Eighties...

There was a strange tightness in his chest and everything started going black. As the darkness overtook him, he heard Peck say "I think we killed him." and Murdock reply "Good. Things'd get too boring if there was nobody after us.".


End file.
